Dana's View: Flakes or flaking

Friday

Oct 20, 2017 at 3:01 AM

The word flake has a lot of elasticity in it. For example, some of us are referred to as flakes, meaning a degree of erratic behavior, not grounded, out there somewhere. Then of course there are snowflakes, those drifting bits of frozen water of infinite and intricate design.

Years ago flakes were commonplace around any fishing community, back before the days of refrigeration. These flakes (flake yards) were basically racks for the drying and salting of the fillets of fish. Their function was to provide a platform for rubbing in the salt and to expose the raw fish flesh to the drying capabilities of the sun so essential to the long-term storage of this readily procured food.

Once dried and salted, the flesh was nearly impervious to the elements (or anything else).

I can’t imagine that this preserved fish had any degree of flavor, other than salt. But it was food, easily prepared food, and often at a time when other foodstuffs were scarce. So it filled a void and as such was tolerated. After all, salty food was far better than no food at all.

Sometimes the word flake can refer to a size designation, as in a flake of paint, meaning a fragment of paint.

So from these few descriptions it is pretty obvious that the word flake can mean any number of things, depending on context.

But back in the day, before the ready access to heavy equipment, to flake something could also mean to take that something apart. The flaking was followed by reassembling whatever it was. Flaking was commonplace and a readily used technique for moving materials.

It was, with the help of friends, an easy way to move objects too large, too bulky, to be moved in their entirety. If the object was a building, the building was divided into portable sections, sections that could be moved by the manpower available.

My uncle’s first camp on the family land on Monomoy was a reconstructed flaked shed and later he added a flaked hot dog stand - the latter became a very cozy bunk room. Indeed, the whole building was cozy, a nice sounding word meaning it was very tight going in there.

I was looking through some old photographs the other day and I came across a picture of our old garage being reassembled after being flaked. This particular flaking happened in 1937 and very nearly caused my demise.

My father had heard of a basically sound garage over in Harwich that needed to be moved. After examining said garage, he decided we could use it; all that now remained was how to move it the couple of miles to our home.

Father rounded up his two brothers and two other friends and they attacked the building. Five young men, one smallish building, it was no contest. In seemingly no time there were shingled slabs of the old garage littering the ground.

He then hired a local fellow who had a sizable truck, sizable enough to carry all the pieces of the building and they proceeded to load up the truck. When everything was aboard and lashed down, off we went to the building’s final destination, our back yard.

It was down Route 28 with me, the truck owner’s son (also age 6) and the truck owner himself. The other boy and I started wrestling (long before the days of seatbelts), the door popped open and I took my first flying lesson. It was a brief lesson followed by a very hard landing, on my head. The next thing I remembered was being ensconced on our couch with my head wrapped in white bandages to a fare-thee well.

But the garage pieces were now about where they were going to reside for a very long time. Eventually the brothers, the friends were again rounded up and shortly after that, the shingled slabs were joined together and once again resembled a garage.

In those days we were into D.I.Y. as a way of life. This was during the Great Depression and nearly everyone was ‘making do’ somehow or other. Ingenuity was commonplace and expected.

We had used the garage for one winter as a stall for a horse. As I understood it, if we would house and feed the animal we could use it all winter. We did just that. This old garage was also the birth place of many projects, mostly small boats or the rebuilding of same. In time of wooden boats this was a commonplace ritual, not an unpleasant winter task.

Piles of flotsam and jetsam started filling the place as well as tools that were not quite far enough gone to throw away and usually not quite good enough to use either. The ‘why’ of the last sentence will have to await examination by a psychologist to be understood. But if the psychologist is a Cape Codder the ‘why’ may never be explained. A Cape Cod mystery?

The last time I looked, the old garage was still there, still serving its purpose as it had for all these past eight decades.

Flaking - making a visable connection to times past.

--Dana Eldridge a former teacher, is the author of three books, "Once Upon Cape Cod," "Cape Cod Lucky" and "A Cape Cod Kinship: Two Centuries, Two Wars, Two Men." He lives in Orleans.